IAFE   05512
INSTITUTO DE ASTRONOMIA Y FISICA DEL ESPACIO
Unidad Ejecutora - UE
congresos y reuniones científicas
Título:
Emission measure distribution of nanoflare-heated coronal loops
Autor/es:
M. LÓPEZ FUENTES; J. A. KLIMCHUK
Lugar:
Cambridge
Reunión:
Workshop; Coronal Loop VII Workshop; 2015
Institución organizadora:
University of Cambridge
Resumen:
The emission measure (EM) distribution of coronal loop plasmas has been recently used to test coronal heating mechanisms. In particular, it is argued that the amount of emitting plasma at the temperature of maximum emission relative to the plasma at 1 MK is determined by the kind of process producing the heating. The parameter commonly used to characterize the EM distribution is the slope of the log(EM) versus log(T) histogram between the above temperatures. In this work, we analyze the EM distribution obtained from a cellular automaton model of multi-stranded nanoflare-heated coronal loops. Our model (Lopez-Fuentes and Klimchuk 2015, ApJ, 799, 128) is based on the idea that footpoint motions produced by photospheric convection introduce magnetic stress between the elementary strands that form loops. When the stress becomes critical magnetic energy is released in the form of reconnection events identified as nanoflares. We simulate the plasma response to the nanoflares and obtain the EM distribution of the loop plasma. We test different model parameter combinations within solar values and find EM slopes that reproduce the observed ranges. We discuss the implications of these results for the coronal heating problem.